my art diary or how to make (or at least think about making) art while spending quality time with the day job, family, friends & dogs (not in any particular order)

Thursday, July 28, 2011

citrasolv diversion

great trip to arizona, even if it was 107.... got some good things accomplished work- wise and was traveling with one of my co-workers, so that was fun too. we had to drive up to prescott to see a store, which was great because i had never been there. after work was done, we went downtown and parked- lo and behold- right in front of the local artist's coop, Arts Prescott Gallery . i got to talk to one of the artists about how their coop works, which is always fun and discovered a new artist to be inspired by, raina gentry .

home late last night, but got some studio time in tonight.

one of the techniques in the plaster book is using a citrasolv (an organic cleaning product found in health food stores and now in art stores too) transfer. i had been talking to another artist about the national geographic citrasolv technique a few weeks ago, so i thought i'd give both a try. i'll share the transfer results later.

something about national geographic magazines produced in the last 10 years and citrasolv makes magic. you brush the concentrate on pages with photos, close the book, mush it together

wiping away the oozy black ink as needed. and yes it's messy and do it outside (or in a well ventilated area). i thought "this isn't so bad, what are they talking about?" until i took the pages into my studio to dry and was overwhelmed by orange scent.

here's a page in progress.

several hanging to dry (on the open door!)

and some of the final product as scanned in

love the way that the bear is still visible in this one-

how cool are these? i am going to scan all in for future use as backgrounds or just to print out again and use the originals in my mixed media. sort of reminds me of the effect you get when dipping a photo in bleach. i ended up with a lot of images from the original pages- you can see letters in some of these and of course the bear, so will experiment with leaving it longer, mooshing it together more and using more citrasolv even tho i am really happy with the bits left in on these.

work tomorrow, power tools class on saturday (what fun!) and hanging day on sunday- which means i must finish at least one more piece to swap out. more on that later too.

3 comments:

Hey, you were in AZ? Only one state away from me! Marianne, this technique looks so cool. It reminds me of effects you can get w/ copper plate etching- but w/ far less work! If I ever get the space I may play w/ this idea. Citrasolve, who'd have guessed?!